Rogue Angel 50: Celtic Fire (17 page)

Chapter 33

“Okay, I’m here. Now what’s going on?”

Annja had driven nonstop since picking up her things from the hotel and grabbing a salve from the chemist to treat the burns on her arm and face.

She arched her back, trying to work out the kinks in her spine as she did so. All she wanted was food, a hot bath and the chance to stretch out on a bed for an hour or so. Judging by the older man’s face she’d be lucky to get half an hour to gulp down a soda and a sandwich.

“Where’s the stone?” It wasn’t the most welcoming of greetings but they were the first words she heard from Roux’s lips. Not
How are you?
Not
What happened to your face?
Just “Where’s the stone?” Priorities established in three little words.

“In the car,” she told him. “What do you want me to do with it?”

“Garin, go move it into our car.”

Garin looked at Roux like he wanted to slice him up into tiny pieces, but he pushed himself out of his seat and took Annja’s keys from her outstretched hand without a word of complaint. She knew just how much he hated being treated like the man’s squire, but old habits—really old habits—died very hard indeed.

“What happened to your face?” Roux asked when Garin left.

She told him. He listened carefully, stopping her occasionally and asking her to repeat certain parts in the chain of events, making sure he understood everything that had occurred. He couldn’t mask his disappointment that she’d lost the sword, but didn’t chastise her, which only made Annja feel like more of a failure.

“How does it feel?” He touched his own cheek. “It doesn’t look good.”

“I won’t be going on camera for a while,” she said, “but I’ll live.”

“Good job you’re not vain,” Garin said, appearing behind Roux.

“Who says?” Annja teased. “Anyway, as much as I missed you guys, this isn’t my idea of a vacation. I’d go so far as to say nearly getting killed means it sucks. So, are you going to tell me why I had to drive like a bat out of hell to be here tonight instead of arriving tomorrow?”

“The old man wants us to break into the castle,” Garin said, slumping back into his chair. He dropped her keys in front of her, then added, “With no equipment and under the watchful eye of an elite royal guard.”

“Hence not just going in through the front gate, I take it.”

“Yep. I don’t really fancy being shot down in my prime,” Garin said.

“Right, but aren’t there huge spotlights illuminating the whole show at night?”

“Yep again. There are some more secluded angles, but how does free-climbing in the dark sound?”

“Foolish, reckless, downright dangerous. Stupid. How many more adjectives do you need?”

“Not even
cool?
” Garin said wryly. He wasn’t looking at her; he was looking at Roux as though to say,
I told you so.

“Why so negative, Annja? It’s not as if you’re not a superhero, after all. Think of all those women who’d be empowered by your heroics. You can do it.” That was Garin’s version of a rah-rah pep talk. She almost smiled, purely because she knew he was every bit as vehemently against the break-in as she was.

“I’m not asking you to do something beyond your particular gifts,” Roux said, ignoring Garin to look at Annja. “And you don’t need to go inside the castle itself, just get yourselves up onto one of the towers.”

“And we both need to go up?”

“It’s better, yes.”

“And let me guess, we’re doing it tonight?” She already knew the answer.

“Now.”

Chapter 34

Garin secured the rope to her waist.

She’d free-climbed plenty of times, higher and more complicated climbs than this, but this was sheer. And the heavier the rope was going to feel as it tugged behind her.

Annja rested her hand against the wall.

The stone was slick with moisture.

Not good,
she thought.

She’d known that it was a dumb idea the moment the suggestion came out of Garin’s mouth. But the reality of just how dumb was only beginning to settle in now she was confronted by the actual climb and their narrow spot where they were out of sight of the guards and the powerful spotlights.

They were estuary-side of the castle, and while there would be no spray from the almost-still water, the air was damp enough to ensure that the stone was never truly dry.

The trick wasn’t to cling to the stone face but to even her weight distribution out and maintain three points of contact at all time; less than that and the risks increased exponentially. Even so, the toeholds were treacherously slippery, and more than once as she began the slow ascent she felt the rough grip of the shoe’s tread slip, meaning she had to go much slower than she would have liked. It was a long way down should she fall, and she wasn’t even halfway yet. There were so many things she was doing here she wished she wasn’t. Though Roux was adamant, not so much as a scratch on the castle wall, not so much as the
tink
of a hammer driving in a belay pin. Nothing that might draw the guards, who would almost certainly shoot first and ask questions later.

Great, she thought bitterly, working her way slowly higher. Her arm gave her problems. The muscle beneath the burn couldn’t take her weight as well as her other arm, meaning she favored it as she climbed. That presented an entirely new set of problems for the ascent.

Garin waited at the bottom.

Roux was somewhere in the shadows, with a vantage point that included the street and the castle gates.

She had only seen one soldier on patrol, his silhouette moving along the battlements. The rest were no doubt inside watching the football now the gates were secured. After all, they wouldn’t expect any sort of insurgency or break-in. This wasn’t Egypt on the brink of civil war; this was a sleepy little town in North Wales. Not exactly a hotbed of revolution since the days of Owain Glyndŵr.

The blocks of stone were large, meaning that she had to stretch for each toehold and push herself up for every fingerhold. It wasn’t good. It was exactly how accidents happened, but Annja was in the zone. She moved instinctively, choosing the holds without looking at them, without looking down at the drop, and when the slick surface threatened to betray her, she trusted her shoes to keep her on the rock.

Eventually her hand reached out, flexing and stretching, seeking the next handhold, and found a flat surface for her fingers to curl over. She was at the top.

There was no flooding sense of relief; this was the most dangerous part of the climb.

A fall from here would be fatal.

Garin might have bought shoes, but he’d skipped handy safety stuff like a helmet—not that a helmet would have made a lot of difference from a fall like this. The damage caused to bones and internal organs would be too much to survive.

It was hard not to think of Awena and her own fall, though from a substantially lower elevation. She had walked away. A single slip now and Annja wouldn’t be so lucky.

Muscles and sinews strained and ached as she reached over the parapet, the rough edge of stone block digging into her flesh through the thin material she was wearing. An extra layer of clothing would have provided more warmth and protected her against this, but would also have made her more bulky and less agile, and right now agility was key.

At last she was over, aching and exhausted with the effort.

She lay on the stone floor on the other side of the parapet, struggling to catch her breath and trying to will the pain away. She could hear Garin down below, hissing like a cat. It wasn’t exactly subtle. She rolled over onto her stomach and rose.

The moonlight had been no help when she’d been climbing, but here, on one of the highest parts of the castle, there was nothing to cast shadows. So she stood in a pool of clear moonlight for all the world to see—all they had to do was look her way.

There was no obvious mooring point for the rope, so she wrapped a length of it around one of the merlons, the solid parts of the defensive wall around the tower. Between the crenels she secured the rope with a knot she would be able to release once they’d both climbed back down. She checked the knot a couple of times before giving Garin the signal to climb.

He scrambled up the wall quickly, with the rope threaded around his leg and trapped in his feet to serve as a makeshift harness.

She watched as he climbed, then used her vantage point to see if she could see Roux, but he was well and truly hidden.

She glanced over the other side of the parapet down into a courtyard.

There was no sign of anyone patrolling. Again, she reasoned, why should they be? The guards might be there to ensure that no one had planted a bomb inside one of the main buildings ahead of the royal visit, but that didn’t mean they had to maintain a state of heightened vigilance. There was no reason to assume they’d come under attack. It was very much business as usual.

She checked back, surprised that Garin was almost at the top.

She braced herself and offered an arm to help haul him over the battlement.

It took a couple of minutes to wind the rope up, carefully making sure that it wouldn’t snag on itself when lowered down again. Care was everything. They worked in silence.

Done, they crouched down. “Time to check in,” Annja said.

Garin pressed a button on the Bluetooth earpiece he was wearing and then said, “We’re in.”

Annja pressed a finger to her lips as the sound of heavy footsteps echoed on the inside of the castle walls. Someone was crossing the courtyard. It might not be a regular patrol checking for intruders, but that didn’t mean that the man would not be keeping his eyes and ears open.

She held her finger there until the last echo of the footsteps died away.

It sounded as though the footsteps had been moving toward the tower, but she could not be sure. The acoustics were tricky. She didn’t like the added risk that came with working blind.

Garin nodded.

He scrambled away from her, moving like a crab, running his hands over the stone floor of the parapet, until, in the corner farthest from them, he located a dark opening. No doubt the stairwell down the inside of the tower, which would lead either down to the courtyard, the walkway along the inside of the defensive wall or possibly both.

“Found it,” he whispered. “Okay.” A beat. “Okay.” And to Annja, he said, “This might take a few minutes.”

He pulled a small Swiss Army knife from his pocket and opened it up. He ran the blade between the stone blocks to clear out the grit and dirt that had gathered and been ground in over the generations. Annja watched him work. It was plainly obvious the stone hadn’t been disturbed recently.

If the mantle was gone it had been taken years ago.

He slowly opened the gap around the stone with his knife until the blade slid easily into the dirt. “This is the one.”

Annja unhooked a tool that Roux had given to her, a strange piece that turned at right angles. Garin nodded and she worked the hook’s bill into the slot he’d levered up. She slowly turned the tool ninety degrees, teasing and twisting it until she could feel the hook grind into position under the slab.

Together, they tugged on the handle, and stone ground against stone as the slab shifted a fraction.

They looked at each other and nodded, timing the moment of pressure, and the stone shifted again, slowly at first. Then the fragments of grit and grime that his knife hadn’t been able to shift exploded in a shower of dust. Garin shifted his position and slipped the fingers of one hand into the gap they had created to gain a secure grip.

As the stone slab was lifted, it became obvious that its edge had been cut to create an overlap that sat on a matching shoulder in the stones surrounding it, fashioning a hollow beneath it. Once Garin had lifted the slab sufficiently, Annja could get her hand inside. She expected to find the Mantle of King Arthur, but her fingers closed on nothing.

She felt about frantically, but it wasn’t there.

“It’s gone,” she said.

“It’s got to be there.”

“It’s gone. As in, it’s not there.”

“Oh, man, Roux’s going to lose it. He already thinks this is all his fault. I’m not going to be the one to tell him. He loves you. You get to break the bad news. If he hears it from me—”

“Shh,” Annja hissed as she worked her fingertips into the deepest corner of the secret space. She felt them brush over something, something with a different texture. Something that didn’t belong in there. She found an edge and pinched it between a finger and thumb and pulled it out. It was a muslin bag and it had obviously deteriorated over time.

Annja sank back against the wall, oblivious to the fact that Garin was beginning to struggle with the slab.

She nodded and he dropped it back into place. He brushed dirt into the grooves, rubbing as much of it in as he could to mask the fact the hiding place had been discovered. Not that they were worried about any would-be treasure hunter, but rather because they didn’t want some soldier to come along in the morning and discover that the tower had been breached.

“I take it that’s it?” he asked, indicating the muslin sack, but Annja didn’t get the chance to respond. They heard the sound of heavy boots on stone steps in the stillness.

“Move!”

Garin didn’t need to be told twice.

In an instant he snatched up the rope and threw it over the parapet wall. The rope made enough noise to carry to the courtyard and market square in the quiet night, but the sound of the footsteps didn’t quicken. Garin went first, and as he went over the top she pressed the muslin sack into his hand before he rappelled down the side. Annja followed him, wrapping her wrist and waist around the rope, ready to step out into nothing as she heard a voice calling out.

“Who’s there?”

The beam of a flashlight shone upward from the stairwell.

In a moment it would be too late. She had to go over the top now even though Garin wasn’t on the ground. The guard was seconds from emerging onto the platform and seeing her. It was now or never. She stepped off the wall into thin air, bouncing hard, once, twice, three times, the rope burning as it slid through her hand. She needed to get to the bottom and release the rope before the guard saw it and raised the alarm.

Still thirty feet shy of the ground, she found a hand jam and pulled the quick release on the knot, sending the rope snaking to the ground.

Annja held her position, listening, and willing the guard to move on without investigating any further.

“Must have been the wind, or birds,” a voice called back down the stairwell. She willed him to go away. “Nothing up here.”

Annja let out a deep breath as the flashlight beam turned around the perimeter wall above her, casting weird shadows through the crenellations, but the guard’s face never appeared over the edge.

Hanging there, Annja felt the muscles in her injured arm slowly burn, cramping until her fingers felt like they had to let go to ease the ever-increasing fire she felt inside the wound. All she could think was that there was no way she could make the climb back down again—her muscles and sinews had frozen—but she had no choice. It was that or fall. And she didn’t like the odds of survival if she simply let go.

She shifted her balance, taking all of her weight on her toes to relieve the strain on her injured arm. Sweat gathered at the nape of her neck and trickled slowly down her spine. It broke out on her brow, rolling down her temples, and threatened to sting her eyes. The fact she couldn’t just wipe it away made the sensation excruciating. She breathed hard, blinking furiously to clear her vision, and then moved her hands one line of bricks lower, taking her weight on the fingers of her good hand, and was moving again with painstaking care. It was considerably more taxing than the climb had been. She could feel Garin willing her on, but wasn’t about to risk a misstep.

No looking down. Cheek pressed tight to the stone so she could feel the roughness against her skin as she descended, until at last she felt the lightest of touches of his hands on her ankles. His voice was reassuring and she allowed his shoulders to take her weight before she dropped the last few feet.

He nodded toward the opened muslin bag, its contents spilled on the ground. There was a small chamois leather wrap, which he’d unfolded to reveal a small envelope with Roux’s name in careful faded script. What there wasn’t, was any sort of cloak or mantle.

“I know it’s supposed to be invisible, but...”

Not good. Not good at all,
Annja thought, trying to process it all. The hiding place had been compromised, the treasure long gone. All that was left in its place was some sort of letter to taunt Roux, and now they were going to have to tell him they’d failed. Again. Today wasn’t a good day.

“Where’s Roux,” she asked.

“Not here.”